The Lonely Fire
by kaloe
Summary: Spoilers include the identities of the Oceanic Six and a few other little ones from season four. Jack/Kate. "True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights..."


"True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights..."

Erich Segal

Her first night on the island, after closing up the doctor's back and feeling paranoid about the stitches for the next three hours, after introducing herself to a couple people and rummaging around in the wreckage for _something_ to eat, _something_ to sleep on, Kate had sat alone on a blanket by a fire that provided a beautiful oasis of light in the slowly darkening, unfamiliar place they would later call home.

She sat by herself for what could have been hours; the slow, reassuring lull of the tide had seduced her senses - like it had ever since her first trip to the beach when she was small - creating a personal ozone layer to keep out the terror of what had happened high in the sky when the sand of the curved beach was still untouched. And in that way humans have of disturbing the contented solitude of others, she had felt a ripple in her armour, a gentle rush of air and the unmistakeable smell of a man beside her. He had been standing, hands in pockets, so his voice drifted down to her from somewhere above.

"Something's on your mind," he stated, in a tone of voice Kate considered entirely too personal for an exchange between almost complete strangers. Still, she had not meant to be impolite in her answer.

"Give the man a medal," she said. "No one's thoughts are exactly at rest at the moment."

He did not laugh, but she heard his grin when he asked if he could sit. She said he could, if he really wanted.

"Bored yet?" Kate asked the fire; her eyes had not left it in over an hour, and her ears had not heard anything but the sea and the doctor in the same amount of time.

"You don't give yourself many chances, do you?" the doctor had replied, after laughing quietly. He seemed quite light-hearted considering the circumstances, and Kate decided she needed more of that sort of thing in her life, so she didn't mind.

"I meant this," she said, allowing for a small twitch of the lips and finally unlocking her gaze from the flames, instead opting to lock it onto the doctor. "Being here. You seem like the kind of guy who likes to always be doing things." Inside, Kate accused herself of hypocrisy - that, Kate, _that_ was personal. She picked up a stick from the sand and shifted a little on the blanket, trying to revive the blood flow to her legs.

He nodded at her busy fingers. "You seem like that sort of person, too." Each of them were silent for a moment before he audibly snorted, then started to properly laugh, "I mean, when you're not staring at fires or oceans for hours on end."

Kate did laugh, but it was only for a moment. "Were you keeping an eye on me?"

"Sort of," he admitted.

Kate learned three new things about the doctor over the next twenty minutes. The first thing was that he worked in a general practice in LA where the coffee machine was never working. The second thing was that he once took a few flying lessons; they helped him decide that piloting planes definitely wasn't for him, but they also equipt him with the information to give Kate a chilling run-down of exactly what happened to them in the minutes before they fell out of the sky. She internally recalled the turbulence and the way her drink had rippled and shuffled across the little folding table, the way she could hear the handcuffs clink with every involuntary nervous shudder. And she remembered the tremendous shriek of tearing steel and aluminium as their tail-section fellows were torn away from them; unconsciously, she shivered, praying that the doctor was right about the black box.

His name was Jack. That was the third thing, and she liked him.

She stares into the fire now, the only difference being that it is framed with pinewood pillars and safely confined behind a small wrought-iron grate. The bag of kindling leaning against the bookshelf to the right, slightly used, was bought from Wal-Mart, and the soft, too-comfortable armchair she is sitting on - living on - is from a catalogue. It matches the decor perfectly. Kate has been reading Stephen King late at night because it scares the crap out of her and being scared, she decides, is better than feeling nothing at all.

Lately, Kate has taken a liking to sitting on this armchair for too long. Occasionally Lara, her housekeeper and Aaron's nanny, has let herself into the sounds of the boy crying while Kate sits absently staring out of the double doors to the garden or into the fire, totally lost. Whenever she approaches Kate and asks if she would like a coffee, or a sandwich, or a holiday, or _anything_, the reply is always the same.

"I'd like to be alone."

She spends her days, nights and her life alone with Aaron in this monster of a house - not yet a home - and she can never seem to get what she needs. To be truly alone in her mind. For it to just quieten down a little. Lara has no idea what she can possibly be thinking of all this time in her chair, for all the thinking space must have been cleared out by now - each thought or memory carefully replayed, pored over, sorted, tucked away neatly.

When Kate has been at this - this strange, silent vigil - for six days, Lara decides that the next day will be the day. Do Something About It Day. Descending the stairs after putting Aaron to bed, she grabs her coat from the lowest banister and pulls it on, preparing herself for the late November wind. She goes to call to Kate, but a noise other than her voice seems to come out of her voice box. It is a shrill, grating noise and upon hearing it she jumps about half a mile in the air before realising it is the door bell. Lara glances at the clock - 8:05pm - then back at Kate, but the younger woman has not moved an inch. Turning back to the door, she feels certain they aren't expecting anybody.

When she opens the door, Jack Shephard does a double-take, looking confusedly at the number above Lara's head and then looking back at her quizically.

"I'm sorry, I think I--"

"No, no, you've come to the right place, Mr Shephard," Lara says kindly to the man she has seen and read about in the papers, and steps back to allow him into the hall. "I'm Lara, Kate's housekeeper," she says, as though it is a big secret, and holds out her hand to Jack. They shake hands and Jack cranes his neck around Lara, who has her back to Kate. Lara has not seen her like this in days. Standing, and smiling. Lara decides there will probably be another time to make small talk with Jack Shephard, and promptly leaves.

Jack hasn't seen Kate in over a month, and her smile is more beautiful than he remembers it ever being. In fact, as they stand still in their places, twenty feet apart, he decides that it isn't just be the fire that is lighting up the living room.

Jack is sipping from a glass of wine and it is twenty past ten. Outside it is pitch black and Kate does not want him to leave tonight because they are discussing _The Shining_ and since Jack arrived her senses have been on overload, including the one that picks up on those bumps in the night. The other, more pleasurable senses are making a very welcome return after almost a week of complete numbness.

The first thing he asked her when he got there was if she had anything to drink because the drive was long and he didn't realise how far away his house was from hers. She said they did. He drank a can of Pepsi in three mouthfuls before he followed her to the living room and sat on her chair.

He couldn't have known, Kate reasoned, it was a completely random decision on his part. Even so, Kate was pretty sure she felt Earth's axis tilt for a second, before it righted itself at the feel of his eyes looking into hers and the smell of his aftershave as she took his coat.

So now at twenty minutes past ten on a Friday evening, with Jack sipping demurely from a crystalized glass of Australian red in the chair opposite the one she occupies, her mind is finally starting to clear.

"I think that's where they went wrong with the movie, y'know. Too much of the story happens inside the guy's head, so obviously it would be difficult to adapt that to the screen or whatever..." Jack explains, and Kate finds herself lulled by the sound of his voice. She really, really likes the sound of it, and she enjoys watching the way his hands move in the firelight when he is illustrating a point.

She is brought back to reality when he asks her, "So what's been going on with you, Kate?" He sounds especially good when he says her name.

"With me?" she repeats, surprised for some reason.

"Yeah," Jack smiles, "I've been here--" he checks his watch "--God, over two hours and all we've talked about is wine, Australia, Aaron's birthday and Jack Nicholson. I came here to see you, Kate."

She sighs and thinks about it. "I don't know where my head's been this week." Her gaze is floating back to the fire, and she doesn't like it. "It's like, after the trial I gave myself permission to sit still and try and... make sense of everything that's happened. I started to think about the island, of course, which was awful, then about Jin and Sun and Claire..." Kate notices Jack shift in his seat a little, nervous of bugs or CCTV. "Then I thought about Sawyer," she says because she has to tell someone. "I don't know what I was thinking about," she adds, "I just... it was all him for a day or so. Just him in my head." Kate swallows, and it is strangely cleansing, like telling Jack these things is helping to alleviate the weight of them. She supposes that is one of the reasons he is such a good doctor; his presence is healing in itself and somehow soothing to her.

"I've been thinking a lot about you, too," Kate announces, and looks away from the fire and into his eyes, just like her first night on the island. She smiles ruefully, and Jack smiles back, seemingly glowing with pleasure in the waning light of the fire. He knows things, Kate thinks. He knows a lot of things.

I_"How do you know all that?"_/Ishe hears herself say, a lifetime ago on a beach in the middle of Nowhere, infront of a fire by a plane with a man who is stealthily making his way across the thick woollen rug towards her and then he is--

--he is really kissing her. She can feel that he wants to be doing this, and she can feel that he knows she wants to be doing this, too... A distant clink in a galaxy at the far end of the universe tells her he has placed his glass on the coffee table beside them and a much louder, more gooseflesh-raising message is telling her he has found better things to do with his hands. They slide around her waist and across her back and lift her out of the chair so she stands - barely - in his embrace infront of the fire in a big house in Los Angeles, realising this was their destination all along.


End file.
